Guatelli Museum

Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

We take the everyday things for granted. We cannot survive without them. Yet, we do not spare much thought for them - their beauty nor dignity. A writing desk, a pen stand, a pair of scissors… all mute witnesses to our day-to-day lives. But we forget how indispensable they are. But there was someone who did not. He gave them due respect and left them as his very poetic legacy to us.

This “museum of everyday life” somewhere in Parma, Italy (the land of Parmesan cheese apparently) is a repository of mundane objects collected by an elementary school teacher Ettore Guatelli. Multiple specimens of an object are displayed in patterns creating an interesting visual narrative of everyday life, long gone by.

An excerpt from blog post about this museum on Italian Ways:

Jorge Luis Borges never visited the Guatelli Museum, in Ozzano Taro. But perhaps he unwittingly described its essence in his nostalgic poem, “Things”: “My walking-stick, small change, key-ring, / The docile lock and the belated / Notes my few days left will grant / No time to read, the cards, the table, / A book, in its pages, that pressed / Violet, the leavings of an afternoon / Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten, / The reddened mirror facing to the west / Where burns illusory dawn. Many things, / Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails, / Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves, / So blind and so mysteriously secret! / They’ll long outlast our oblivion; / And never know that we are gone.”

Photo via Wiki Commons